I. Fictive EthnicitiesIn choosing a topic for the 1996 International Roundtable, Iimagine the organizers might have had in mind, among otherthings, an increasing sense of the intractability of ethnic identityas a source of conflict and violence around the globe. Such concernis widespread and well founded. Many commentators haveremarked with surprise on the resurgence of ethnic particularismin the late 1980s. In light of such disturbing phenomena as“ethnic cleansing” in Eastern Europe, the question is oftenposed: Is ethnic difference consistent with universal values andrights? Sometimes this question appears as a debate about thedesirability or danger of “cultural relativism,” whether in relationto the American school curriculum or the African practiceof clitoridectomy. Another question often raised is whether ethnicidentity strengthens or undermines the nation, that is,whether nations should correspond to ethnicities, or whethernations are better conceived of as a secular and neutral alternativeto ethnicity. The ongoing tragedies in both Rwanda andBosnia make these questions especially urgent.In response to such conflicts, political leaders and others haveemphasized the drawing of boundaries and the separation ofpeoples as the best remedy to ethnic conflict, appealing to ethnicidentity as both the source of tension and the basis of a resolution.Such a viewpoint assumes, among other things, that ethnicityis separable from its historical conditions or conflicts, andthat ethnicity preexists history in some way, such that already175established and differentiated ethnic groups meet on the historicalstage. In the framing of all of the issues and questions I havementioned, ethnic identity is assumed to be something originaryand natural, such that it is ethnic identity that produces the particularitiesof ethnic culture. In this framework, ethnic identity isassumed to be something distinct and specific that each of ushas, an important and determining component of our individualidentities. Thus, insofar as ethnic identity is understood as naturalor unchanging, it appears to be a perpetual source of conflictas well as the necessary basis for any political or socialaction.Ethnicity has usually been taken to refer to a group’s holdingsomething in common, whether language, religion, geographicalorigin, common history, some physical characteristic, geneticsimilarity, or some other attribute. But in fact none of these characteristics,either alone or in combination, can systematicallyaccount for the differences and groupings everyone willnonetheless agree actually exist. For this reason, ethnicity is notthe kind of empirical fact that we can isolate and understandabstractly. There is no essential, universal determinant underlyingthe idea of ethnic identity as a fundamental and unvaryingaspect of human history, which is what identity in its traditionalphilosophical or scientific sense is usually taken to mean. Just asthere is no essential or constant determinant of ethnicity, there isno form of ethnicity that is absolutely pure or uncontaminated.Any attempt to discover some aspect of ethnic purity that wouldserve as origin or ideal can be easily shown to be false; everyimagined purity turns out to be already contaminated andhybrid. Although communities may understand themselves assharing a particular ethnicity, these ethnic identities are not naturalor eternal; rather, they are “invented” to give a sense ofcoherence and tradition to groups that are constantly reformingand shifting (this is what Etienne Balibar has called “fictive ethnicities”).Ethnicity in the sense I am describing is constantlybeing contested and reinvented. It is not the sign of the timelessorigin of a people; rather, it is the always newly created expressionof an experience in the present.1But to say that ethnicity is fictive or invented is not to say thatit is not powerful. Indeed, the appeal to ethnic identity both as abasis for political struggle and as an explanation for various con-Macalester International Vol. 4176flicts seems stronger than ever. For this reason, I am interestedless in determining what ethnic identity is or ought to be than Iam concerned with understanding the way the idea of ethnicityoperates culturally and politically to provide a framework forinterpretation and action. In the current context, we should notbe surprised that the accelerating globalization of commoditycapitalism and its accompanying cultures are exacerbatingalready existing conflicts and creating new ones. Thus, I want toask: What is the significance of the fact that these conflicts areinterpreted and explained from the perspective of ethnicity?And also, in what ways might the lens of ethnicity contain, control,or limit the ways in which conflict can be understood orresolved? These questions are addressed not to the empiricalevents that make up conflict, but to the way these events arerepresented and therefore given meaning and form.Currently in mainstream discourse — by which I mean thelanguage and representations shared as a baseline of commonassumption by politicians, television, film, print media, andreflected in everyday “common sense”—one finds two competingversions of ethnic diversity. On the one hand, there is a positiveimage of pluralistic coexistence in which differences are asource of pleasurable variety rather than conflict or dissent. Onthe other hand, there is the negative image of a world being tornapart by ethnic differences that can only deepen. Of course,these two visions mark a contradiction: ethnicity is representedas being at once a deep and irreducible basis of conflict or separationand, at the same time, a superficial difference that will beovercome by the forces of modernization or globalization. Thiscontradiction is resolved in contemporary discourse through aneffective splitting of what is represented as ethnicity: betweenan assimilable form of difference at the level of style, and an inassimilableotherness that is perceived as threatening. Althoughboth these forms of ethnicity appear in contemporary discourseand analysis, they do not share the same relationship to modernity.Rather, the ideas of good ethnicity and bad ethnicity areimplicitly related as stages in development. Bad ethnicity, anethnic difference that appears as conflictual and irresolvable, isethnicity that has failed to evolve. In this sense, ethnicity itself isanachronistic, reaching back to a premodern past rather thanforging ahead into a future that transcends such quaint particu-Samira Kawash177larities. Thus, while the cosmopolitan image of the global communityis represented as ethnically pluralistic, ethnic particularityis represented as the antithesis of cosmopolitan values andmetropolitan styles.But despite its contradictory nature, ethnicity operates as apowerful explanatory figure. In a media context of short attentionspans and soundbite politics, ethnicity provides a convenientand simplifying shorthand to signal, describe, andunderstand conflict. Such a simplification is dangerously convenient,swiftly and imperceptibly shifting our attention awayfrom a careful consideration of the historical and political forcesparticular to a specific situation that might reveal a complexityof positions and interests. Conflicts ranging from mild discriminationto full-scale war may have material, economic, or politicaldimensions, and may be rooted in fundamentaldissymmetries of power or interest. The explanatory and analyticframework provided by ethnicity cannot account for suchcomplexity, and instead refers conflict to forces that lie outsidethe realm of politics or understanding, such as taste, belief,lifestyle, values, and so on. Once conflict has been determined tobe rooted in ethnic differences and ethnic particularities, thenthe splitting of ethnicity into good and bad forms correlates witha splitting of conflict into resolvable and irresolvable conflict.Good ethnicity is taken to be the source of superficial and thereforeresolvable conflicts of style, while bad ethnicity stands asthe source of deeply rooted and irresolvable conflicts. And insofaras both good and bad forms of ethnic identity are understoodas ahistorical and immutable, such conflicts allow for onlytwo solutions: tolerance or exclusion. When conflict can beunderstood as rooted in “good ethnicity,” then a correspondingpolicy of tolerance will assure that each party can continue intheir different styles or ways of life without impinging on theother. However, if conflict is represented as being caused by“bad ethnicity,” then the only solution that can be imagined isabsolute separation, either through a strengthening of borders toexclude the dangerous alien or more ominously through totaldestruction of the threatening alien other.Within this discursive framework, images of globalization,whether presented as imagined or real, are obliged to steer acourse between these poles of good ethnicity and bad ethnicityMacalester International Vol. 4178in their attempts to imagine a global community that containsdifference without conflict. To better understand the effects ofthis discursive maneuvering, I want to look in detail at particularrepresentations of the global community that came to dominatethe popular imagination in the United States during thesummer of 1996: the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta and therelease of the blockbuster action film Independence Day. The narrativestrategy common to the texts I will consider is to contrastthe superficial differences of style with the universal commonalityof the “human family” and to project all threats to the imaginedunity and harmony of this fantasmatic family onto an alienand excluded other. The image of a harmonious and inclusiveglobal community therefore has a necessary counterpart in theimage of the excluded dangerous alien. The inclusive globalcommunity is the site of “good ethnicity,” that is, ethnic and culturaldifferences that generate variety without creating conflict.In contrast, the excluded alien is the site of “bad ethnicity,” thesource of a difference that is dangerous and must be suppressedor controlled to protect the “good” community. Thus, the oppositionbetween good, assimilable ethnicity and bad, conflictualethnicity is refigured as the opposition between the familialcommunity and the alien who both threatens and opposes thatcommunity.The results of this imaginary transformation and simplificationare twofold: first, the community is imagined as having nointernal conflict; and second, the community is imagined as havingno obligation to understand, communicate with, or compromisewith the alien other. The difficult task of addressing thecomplexities of conflict becomes simplified: all that seems necessaryis to shore up and police the boundary between family andalien, between “us” and “them.” I want to suggest that theimage of peaceful harmony that accompanies this splitting into“us” and “them” is absolutely opposite its real effect. Ratherthan producing a harmonious and inclusive global community,the imaginary splitting between good ethnic community andbad ethnic alien is the occasion and justification for violence andrepression, both against any deviation or conflict that appearsinside the community, and against the threat of the alien otherwho appears outside the community.Samira Kawash179The images I will be considering in this essay establish a communitythat is global in scale. This is not to imply, however, thatthey reflect a global desire or a global imagination. IndependenceDay and the Atlanta Olympics television coverage originate inthe United States, and despite their explicit concern with globalissues, they persist in imagining the global community as theextension and expansion of the national community. In general,the global community as it is imagined in the United States neitherrecognizes nor accounts for the existence of other communitiesaround the world that might imagine alternative globalvillages. Nevertheless, due to the international power of the U.S.media, such productions as Hollywood films and U.S.-basedtelevision broadcasts play an important role in projecting particularimages into the international arena, thereby subtly shapingthe possibilities for debate or imagination internationally.2Before continuing, I should briefly clarify my use of the inclusivepronoun “we.” I will be discussing media representationsof community as they appear in mass television advertising andin Hollywood film. These kinds of popular media play anextremely important role in constructing a “we” as the object ofaddress, a “we” that aims to name those who are included andrepresented in the cultural, political, and social life of the community.This is the “we” of the mainstream, a “we” who imaginesitself in a positive, noncritical relation to its position andopportunities. Of course, if you or I as individuals imagine ourselvesas a part of this “we,” it is in large part due to being constantlyaddressed as a member. However, this “we” does not infact include, speak for, or represent everyone; what must beexcluded from the “we” is one of the things I will be focusingon. My use of “we” to describe certain desires, perspectives, orinterests is not to suggest that everyone would agree or wouldhold such things in common. Rather, I am seeking to focus onthe way each of us is asked to participate in the “we,” and whatthis “we” implies as well as what it excludes.II. Where Is the Olympic Village?For two weeks during the summer of 1996, I, along with millionsof other Americans, was a somewhat involuntary participant inthe carefully staged spectacle of global unity and competitionMacalester International Vol. 4180known as the Olympic Games. Although I do not considermyself a sports fan and am studiously indifferent to theOlympics in principle, I could hardly avoid the hype leading upto the games, not to mention the saturation coverage on NBC,expanded to every station after the bomb exploded in Atlanta’sCentennial Park. I want to consider the Summer Olympics as amass public ritual enactment, not simply of hero worship orsports fanaticism, but of a certain global vision of communitybest captured in the metaphor of the global village. While theimages of a sports competition might seem trivial and superficialin relation to images of more urgent and violent global conflict,I want to suggest that the ritual structure of an event suchas the Olympics allows us to perceive the fundamental lineamentsof a basic set of assumptions that structures virtually allrepresentations of global community and conflict, from the highseriousness of the evening news to the preposterous scenarios ofHollywood action movies. Even more explicitly than such formsas the news or popular film, the broadcast of the Olympics isdesigned to interpellate the viewer as a member of the globalcommunity being constituted in the event. Thus, the Olympicsnot only provides an example of the representation of globalcommunity, it is explicitly engaged in the imaginary constitutionof just such a community.The Olympic Games provide a particularly condensed andhighly visible example of the phenomenon of globalization assimultaneously political, cultural, and corporate. The commercializationof the Games is not only a matter of financing, butalso marks the peculiar contemporary conjunction between corporatesponsorship and communal ritual. It is not surprisingthat one of the pavilions in the Olympic compound was calledthe “AT&T Global Village,” suggesting that the very idea of theglobal village is inseparable from AT&T. Such juxtapositions arein no way accidental. Throughout, advertising prepared especiallyfor broadcast during the Games sought to make explicit oremotional connections between the global spirit of the Gamesand the products promoted during the commercial breaks. Inthis way, games and advertising merge into a seductive spectaclethat draws us in by appealing simultaneously to us as consumersand as global citizens. The emphasis on individualathlete heroes suggests that the viewers are invited to identifySamira Kawash181with the athletes and participate in the competition vicariouslythrough them. But a more powerful and pervasive form ofviewer participation is through consumption, both of the broadcastand of the corporate images being aligned with the Gamesthemselves. Although we might like to imagine some “pure”Olympics dedicated to the healthy pursuit of competition andcommunity untainted by the marketplace, the Olympics cannotpossibly be separated from that which in fact constitutes ourglobal community, the international flows of culture and commerce.The Olympics is a marketing event, selling us a globalvision even as it promotes the mundane products of its corporatesponsors.A. Big Family, Small ThreatThis interlacing of global vision and corporate image can be seenin an especially vivid way in a United Parcel Service (UPS)advertisement broadcast during the Games.3 In this ad, UPSuses both Olympic imagery and images of ethnically markedlocales to suggest that despite our apparent differences, we arein fact one big family, joined together under the benevolentguidance of UPS. The commercial opens with a scene of childrendraped in various national flags moving through an abstractrepresentation of an Olympic stadium as the narrator states,“The Olympic Games: celebrating the notion that it truly is asmall world.” The camera then shifts to a series of local shotsthat show UPS trucks, planes, and couriers moving through adesert scene, an elaborate Chinese festival, a Swiss ski village,and the courtyard of the Louvre museum. Over these images wehear, “Unless, of course, you’re UPS, bringing things to theGames in Atlanta from every corner of that small world. Everyday we serve over 200 countries and territories, speak 43 languages,and deliver overnight to a world that still measures25,000 miles around.” The ad closes with adult runners bearingvarious national flags finishing a race and embracing each other,as the voice-over concludes, “Oh, we are one big family; it’s justthat the family is a little spread out. UPS. Worldwide OlympicSponsor.”In this commercial, we see a condensed version of theOlympic vision of the relation between cultural difference andMacalester International Vol. 4182global community. The contrast between separation and togethernessis also a contrast between faraway and near, betweeninaccessible and immediate. Cultural specificity, in costume orarchitecture, is geographically localizable, filmed as part of aspecific landscape that is traversed by some sort of vehicle. Incontrast, the images corresponding to the “small world” (thechildren at the beginning) or the “big family” (the runners at theend) are eerily unlocalizable, dreamlike images that happen inan idealized nowhere. While the Olympics are in Atlanta, the adseems to imply that the global family that is established is everywhereand nowhere. There is also a subtle historical narrativeplayed out in this ad. “Every corner of that small world” thatUPS reaches is envisioned primarily as historically backward,dwelling or arising out of the past. Thus, the visual for “everycorner of that small world” is a desert scene of Arab bedouinsand their camels, absolutely removed from history, technology,or modernity, and having access to the movement of historyonly through the benevolent intervention of UPS, as embodiedin the flight of the UPS airplane that takes us there. A similarperspective informs the sumptuous scene of a Chinese festival,equally calculated to give us the frisson of the faraway and alsothe quaint premodern folkways of a distant people. The historicalnarrative is most immediate in the last “exotic” scene, that ofthe courtyard of the Louvre museum in Paris. The contrastbetween the classical architecture of the museum’s originalbuildings in the background and the futuristic Pei pyramid inthe foreground repeats and reinforces the implicit message ofthe commercial: what makes the world so small, what makes usa big family, is the universal, global march of progress. One ofthe things that makes this ad such an effective promotion forUPS is the way it associates the march of progress with UPS andmakes UPS the agent of that progress. UPS positions itself asmediating between the distance of geography and the nearnessof family, between the primitive conditions of elsewhere and theprogress of “here”; UPS is what makes family possible, despitethese vast distances. In this ad, the difficulties of 200 countries,43 languages, and 25,000 miles are conquered by UPS, leavingus to enjoy the resulting unity and sense of family that is therebymade possible.Samira Kawash183NBC’s coverage of the Games played up similar themes bytreating the athletes as ethnically neutral in the competition,while on the other hand emphasizing the particularities of theirhome countries in the individual athlete profiles. While the profileswere intended to add human interest and depth to the competitions,a perhaps unintended side effect was to treat ethnicityas something the athletes left behind in order to compete in theGames. The implicit message, then, is that ethnic differences areovershadowed or overcome by the global community of theOlympic Village. In a movement from periphery to metropolisreminiscent of the trajectory of UPS, the athletes must leavebehind their individual pasts and their familial or ethnic particularityto join in the Games. And as in the UPS ad, geographicalmovement is allied with historical development. The athletesare depicted moving simultaneously through space, from villagesto cities and from various countries to Atlanta, andthrough time, charting their development from childhood tomature, cosmopolitan athlete.The asymmetry that such images establish and maintainbetween a premodern elsewhere and a futuristic here operatesin part to naturalize the global asymmetry of capitalism, anasymmetry alluded to in the ad by UPS’s reminder that it is“bringing things to the Games in Atlanta from every corner ofthat small world.” We are the beneficiaries of the products andresources of the rest of the world; the world appears here as littlemore than an overgrown shopping mall. In this context, themetaphor of family that concludes the UPS ad becomesextremely important. Depicting the global community as a familyworks powerfully to suppress any possible conflict of interestor dissatisfaction with this global distribution of labor and production—if we are all members of the same family, then all of uswill share in the benefits of this global order. The history of conquestand exploitation that underpins the current relationsbetween First and Third Worlds, between global producers andglobal consumers, between the providers of raw materials andthose who enjoy the final products, is entirely effaced. In itsplace is a mythical narrative of familial unity in which the local,the specific, or the particular serve only to provide color and texture.In this global vision, images of ethnicity may persist, butMacalester International Vol. 4184divisive differences in interest, position, power, or opportunityhave been effaced.The images and narratives that I am teasing out of this ad areby no means unique to UPS or to the Olympics. Indeed, if theywere unique, it is unlikely that they would have anywhere nearthe impact or the credibility they maintain. Rather, they draw ona rich and continually renewed fund of images, metaphors, andmyths that are propagated in various media and that repeat innumerous guises the message that the global community isfamilial, nonconflictual, and essentially homogeneous. Part ofthe effectiveness of these images arises from their success at providingan imaginary resolution to the contradiction between thedangerous but inevitable persistence of ethnic identity and thenarrative of modernity as universalization. This contradiction isresolved by rewriting difference as ethnicity, reducing such differenceto pleasurable but harmless spectacle, and further neutralizingit by banishing it to a temporally and spatially distantelsewhere.B. T-shirt DiplomacyThe tag line of an ongoing Hanes campaign advertising T-shirts,underwear, and casual wear is familiar to many: “Just wait tillwe get our Hanes on you.” These ads typically emphasizehappy, beautiful people lounging or playing in loose, comfortableclothes or underwear. The song, which describes how wonderfulyou will feel when you wear Hanes, features a secondvoice singing, “I just can’t wait, can’t wait.” This voice is ofcourse meant to be our voice; we are the ones who just can’t waitto get our Hanes. In return, we are promised gratification, comfort,and happiness of such profundity that our need becomesurgent: we just can’t wait. I mention this advertising campaignbecause it provides the implicit intertext for the commercialHanes prepared for the Olympics, a commercial that plays onthe theme already established in this ongoing campaign.4 It isinteresting to consider how the promise of Hanes gratification inthe U.S. market shifts to another register when Hanes takes onthe world, Olympic style. As in the U.S. ads, Hanes continues topromise gratification to the wearer. The most significant differencein the Olympic ad is the emphasis on the differences of theSamira Kawash185various people wearing Hanes. Thus, Hanes makes itself aplayer on the global scene, working not simply to clothe theworld in Hanes-wear but, more important, working to unite adivided world through the universal language of the T-shirt. Inits depiction of people around the world putting on Hanes Tshirts,Hanes becomes truly transnational, covering every bodywith the same skin as though to show that if differences in thepast were only skin deep, today even the skin can be changed.The ad establishes a sharp contrast between ethnic identitiesand Hanes identity by narrating the displacement of ethnic ornational identities by a universalizing corporate identity. The adbegins with a series of portraits of individuals, each marked in adifferent way by some particular ethnicity, whether by skincolor, costume, or setting. The voice-over names each of theseindividuals, stating, “To some, people are either Brazilian orNorwegian, Indian or Chinese, South African or Dutch.” Thissequence is followed by a repetition of the same portraits, thistime showing each individual in a Hanes T-shirt, while the voiceadds, “To us, it is much simpler; people are just small, medium,or large.” What some see as “deep” differences — the SouthAfrican and the Irish—Hanes sees as irrelevant; Hanes sees only“small, medium, and large.” The ethnic differences of Indian orChinese with which the commercial begins are implicitly divisive,while the correct image of the world according to Hanes isone distinguished only by the neutral measure of T-shirt size.The ad closes with a chorus singing, “Just wait till we get ourHanes on you.”But if we compare the voice-over with the correspondingimages, we will discover that the “small, medium, and large” ofHanes’s vision is not the neutral nondivision that the voice-overseems to imply. “Small” is a small dark boy in a tropical setting,outside culture or civilization; “medium” is a dark womanstanding outside a hut, simultaneously signifying domesticityand primitivity; while “large” is a light-skinned all-Americanmale, attractive and muscular, his shirt marked with both theOlympic insignia and “U.S.A.” While the cultural or ethnic differencesof nations or peoples are here neutralized and displacedby the scientific measurement of small, medium, andlarge, the imagery that accompanies this contrast in fact repeatsand reinforces very deeply rooted hierarchies of difference: theMacalester International Vol. 4186colonial hierarchy of primitive vs. civilized, the racial hierarchyof dark-skinned vs. light-skinned, as well as the patriarchal hierarchyof children, women, and men. By renaming the differencessignified by these hierarchies as sameness under theunifying sign of the T-shirt, the interlocking and mutually reinforcingsimultaneity of colonial, racial, and patriarchal hierarchiesis thus effaced. That is, Hanes relies on and reinscribes thevery differences it is denying in order to give visual and emotionalforce to its message.As an example of this double-edged appeal to difference, considerthe drama of Westernization as it is enacted over and overin this commercial. Each strange and exotic native body isshown twice, in a pattern of “before and after” comparisons.These natives seem to welcome the Hanes invasion, only toohappy to cast off their traditional ways for the tastes, styles, andvalues of the West. Ornate costumes are presented as the“everyday” style of these cultural others, a style that marks onthe surface the exotic variety of cultures that Hanes will bringtogether under the banner of the 100-percent-cotton Tee. Theformal stylized display of traditional costume, which typicallyincludes sartorial codes of gender, age, and social status, is thuscontrasted to the easy informality, the egalitarian casualness,and the comfortable unisexness of the T-shirt. Thus, the traumaof cultural or economic colonization is recast for the colonizer as anarrative of pleasurable metamorphosis. There is a sexual narrativehere, too, if we understand the T-shirt no longer as underwear,but as the ultimate negation of sexuality, at least as it isworn in this commercial. The erotic temptation of the nativebody is veiled by the T-shirt that renders all bodies interchangeable.The sensual or erotic display of the native body is thustamed and civilized by the more modest, understated T-shirt.We are meant to take pleasure in the display of the other’s body,while remaining reassured that the sensuality initially suggestedhas been adequately controlled. We are also meant totake pleasure in the other’s manifest delight in the gifts theyhave received from us, from the United States, or from Hanes.Thus, the history of colonial encounter and Western imperialismis renarrated to be simultaneously superficial—only a matter ofclothes—as well as progressive—our clothes make your life bet-Samira Kawash187ter. The other enjoys his or her transformation; the other “justcan’t wait.”Here, too, we see the flow of commodities outward, fromHanes to those others, with apparently no reciprocation (exceptthe unstated flow of money back to Hanes). The commercial furthermystifies the relations of production that underpin this pathof consumption; where, after all, do these T-shirts come from? Itwas a scant three months between the public scandal surroundingKathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line, which revealed the horribleconditions of Third World sweatshop production of majorlabel clothing items, and Hanes’s Olympic celebration of puttingclothes on those same Third World peoples, this time recast ashappy consumers. In light of what is left out or distorted byHanes’s global vision, one might be struck by the equivocationof the tag line — “Just wait till we get our Hanes on you” —which seems to play quite closely with an alternative reading,just wait till we get our hands on you. Is there not in Hanes’spromise to clothe the world in comfort also a threat? Perhapsthis is a hint at the sinister side of Hanes’s transnational future, adark and violent underside that is suppressed by the upbeattone of the ad. What violence might be expected at the hands ofHanes as it extends its global reach? And alternatively, howmight the global community imagined by this Hanes commercialalso be allied with some form of violence?III. The Alien ThreatTo consider the relation between global community and violence,I want to turn to the summer blockbuster film IndependenceDay, released shortly before the 1996 games.5 Like the realevent of the Olympics, the fantasy events of Independence Dayplay out in a ritualized form a particular vision of global unity.Independence Day is the story of an alien invasion that threatensto destroy all human life on earth. Although all of earth is threatenedand major cities in every country are destroyed, we see thestory entirely from the point of view of events in the UnitedStates, where the president teams up with a nerdy cable repairman,an alcoholic crop duster, and a heroic air force pilot to savethe world. To say that this film is “patriotic” is an understatement;but its patriotism is expanded, identifying AmericanMacalester International Vol. 4188patriotic fervor with the global struggle for human existence.Rooting for the global community is identical to rooting for theUnited States. This film, in fact, makes this identification explicitin a number of ways, not the least of which is the title and date:Independence Day was released to coincide with the already existingU.S. holiday of Independence Day, and the events depictedin the film take place on July 3 and 4. The alien attack becomesan occasion for the constitution of a new global community,where the global community is understood as an expanded versionof America. As the president rallies the last of the ragtagtroops for a final, climactic, all-or-nothing assault on the aliens,the spectator is swept up in the rhetorical appeal of a worldunited by the threat of a common enemy. The president’s wordsring out:Mankind. The word takes on a new meaning for all of us today. Ifany good has come from this savage and unprovoked attack onour planet, it is the recognition of how much we humans share incommon. . . . It has shown us the insignificance of our thousandpetty differences from one another and reminded us of our deepand abiding common interests.... And if we succeed [in battle]....the Fourth of July will no longer be known only as an Americanholiday, but as the day when all the nations of the earth stoodshoulder to shoulder and shouted: “We will not lay down anddie. We will live on! We will survive! Today we celebrate ourIndependence Day!”6Even the most cynical critic might be swept away by this special-effects frenzy, a thrill ride that demands as its price ofadmission only that you accept the initial premise: that the fundamentalthreat to life and humanity is a slimy and wholly evilalien. In Independence Day, the dangerous difference has beenexternalized, projected onto the repulsive and horrifying bodyof an absolute other who must be not simply controlled butabsolutely obliterated in order to assure the coherence of the“community of mankind” that remains. This film provides aprototypical illustration of the splitting of ethnicity into a goodform that can be recuperated and a dangerous form that must beexpelled or destroyed. The film literalizes this distinction as aspecies difference: the differences between humans are superfi-Samira Kawash189cial, while the difference between alien and human is absolute.Thus, the team of heroes simultaneously relies on ethnic stereotypes(the Jewish intellectual, the African-American fighter, theWASP man in a suit) while presenting a community of harmoniousmulticulturalism in which ethnic differences fail to register,much less matter. The alien, on the other hand, is, well, analien. But we should notice that the alien-ness of the alien is notaltogether unfamiliar even in human terms. I would suggestthat the alien is depicted in precisely the same way as traditionalAmerican nativist or racist discourse has variously describedBlacks, Mexicans, or Chinese: the alien does not speak our language,is hideously ugly, is violent and inclined to criminalbehavior, looks or acts like an insect, and smells bad. Because itis a film in the genre of “save the planet from the alien invasion,”Independence Day does away with the problem of perspectiveor point of view. There can be only one perspective in thisscenario, the perspective of humanity. In this framework, thealiens are absolutely evil and the humans are absolutely good.Thus, the complexities of so-called ethnic conflict in real life aremade absolutely simple and clear. While the humans originallyseek a peaceful community with the alien, the alien seeks only todestroy. It is therefore because of the fundamental evilness ofthe alien that the existence of the alien cannot in any way be reconciledwith the existence of the global community.But notice also the necessity of this alien to the existence of thecommunity. The two are interdependent: it is against the communitythat the alien is identified and demonized, and it is in itscommon struggle against the alien that the community is unified.Such a view would suggest not only that the communityneeds the alien in order to become a community, but that thecommunity in effect produces the alien in order to define itself byprojecting otherness outward. Within the imaginary world ofthe film, the alien appears to exist before the community. But ifwe consider the production of a film such as Independence Day asthe expression of some public fantasy or desire, the alien menaceas it appears in the film becomes a projection of a collective fantasyof a menacing other. It is in this way that one might concludethat the community produces the alien. Yet thisproduction is obscured by the film’s representation of the alienas existing prior to the community and as threatening the com-Macalester International Vol. 4190munity from outside. In other words, the power of IndependenceDay as a narrative lies in its ability to reverse the relationbetween alien and community. The community constitutes itselfby projecting difference onto the excluded other; IndependenceDay transforms this relation into the scene of an absolute otherwho arrives from elsewhere to threaten the already existingcommunity. Thus, the cultural work of narratives like IndependenceDay is not confined to establishing the absolute differenceor the “bad ethnicity” of the alien other. Such narratives alsowork to efface the interrelation between constituting a communityand producing an enemy. Effacing this connection makes itall the easier to conclude that the best response to an alien threatis violent destruction.Independence Day provides a particularly stark example of therepresentational operations that divide the good ethnic communityfrom the bad alien other. But this division, and the exclusionor destruction it implies, is working every day around us toshape and give a simple explanation for contemporary conflictsat the local, national, and global levels. Popular representationsof perceived threats to the well-being of the community such asillegal immigrants and Islamic fundamentalists, two popularversions of the bad or alien ethnic, rely on a logic much like thatof Independence Day. For example, Islamic fundamentalism isrepresented as the absolute antithesis of modernity and Westerncivilization. We are frequently told that Islamic fundamentalistswant to destroy the West. When terrifying or unexplainedevents occur, such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the crashof TWA flight 800, they are immediately blamed on Islamic fundamentalism,which is characterized as the source of absoluteevil and destruction. My point here is not to argue whetherIslamic fundamentalism as a singular phenomenon exists, orwhat it means to the various people who claim it; rather, I wantto suggest that the popular image of Islamic fundamentalism isone example of the projection of an alien otherness that establishesand guarantees the boundaries of the good community.The popular representation of Islamic fundamentalism serves acrucial purpose: it provides a mechanism for establishing an idealizedcommunity by minimizing, suppressing, or effacing internaldifference, and then in turn projecting it outward, where itreappears as a threatening, alien force.Samira Kawash191IV. Border ControlIndependence Day gave us the thrill of obliterating aliens fromouter space. However, in current discussions of the identity andsecurity of the national community, it is not space aliens butimmigrant aliens that are the occasion for political debate andposturing. While those immigrants most objectionable—darkskinned,unskilled laborers — may come from many differentplaces, including South or Central America, Asia, or Africa, theimmediacy of the border with Mexico makes the question ofMexican immigration most politically volatile. Unlike the virtuallyinvisible Canadian border, the U.S.–Mexican border is envisionedas a war zone, a border along which America itself iscontinually put at risk. Especially in California and throughoutthe Southwest, it is the specter of the illegal Mexican alien thatinspires calls for an ever more stringent and exclusionary stancetoward immigration.Contrary to the nativist images that depict Mexicans as aninvasive force that would destroy “our” standard of living, Mexicanimmigrants have historically played a vital role in the U.S.economy, especially California’s agricultural sector. The historyof U.S. Border Patrol efforts in the twentieth century is one ofalternating periods of leniency toward undocumented immigrationfollowed by efforts at mass deportation; this oscillation inpolicy has led to the popular characterization of the U.S. –Mexicanborder as a “revolving door.” The revolving door has servedas a means of controlling, but never stopping, the flow acrossthe border. However, the current debates about the borderneglect this history, instead depicting undocumented workersas a threat to the nation, stealing jobs and resources from “realAmericans.” In the 1990s, the Immigration and NaturalizationService (INS) has been expanded and more aggressivelydeployed, instituting border guards and patrols under the auspicesof Operation Blockade, Operation Hold-the-Line, OperationGatekeeper, and Operation Guardian. As these namessuggest, the INS is viewed increasingly as a militarized force,holding the line against the enemy threat from without.7Like nativist rhetoric, the film Independence Day dramatizes analien invasion in the near future. The space aliens are a powerful,dangerous enemy against which we are nearly helpless.Macalester International Vol. 4192They are like locusts; their intention is to devour the planet andthen move on. There can be no negotiation, compromise, orcoexistence. In Independence Day, it’s either us or them. If wecan’t hold the line and fend off the invasion, life as we know it isfinished. This doomsday scenario given play in the film mightseem at the least an exaggeration of the characterization of thethreat of the “alien invasion” in real life. But the hystericalrhetoric that resulted in the passage of California’s Proposition187 might suggest that the Mexican alien threat is viewed insimilar ways, as an imminent invasion of countless “insects”who threaten to overpower and overwhelm by the sheer force oftheir numbers, devouring all our precious resources, includingjobs, schools, health care, and welfare dollars, and leaving uswith nothing.8 Independence Day thus gives us a fantastical correlateto the politicized image of the border under siege, giving usan alien so inhuman, so singularly evil, that no response seemstoo extreme. Viewed through the lens of Independence Day, thethreat of an alien invasion along the southern border can bemade to appear frightfully real.Such representations are dangerous not only because theyprovide a simplified vision of a complex problem but, moreimportant, because they justify the militarization of the borderand the accompanying escalation of violence against those whowould attempt to cross it. By making violence appear to be theonly possible response to a threat of invasion, such representationsalso make it more difficult to recognize the actual balanceof power that pits the accumulated force of the INS backed bythe U.S. government against the efforts of those attempting tocross the border. As the Border Patrol has become more militarized,human rights advocates have documented a disturbingpattern of violence and abuse on the part of border agentsengaging in apprehension of documented and undocumentedimmigrants.9 At the same time, because of increased patrols andobstacles at easy crossing points, people are forced to attempt acrossing in more isolated or dangerous areas, where many fallprey to criminals, and others are injured or risk death from theelements. In this way, the “national security” that is meant to beeffected at the border inverts itself into a perpetual condition ofinsecurity for those named as a threat.Samira Kawash193Is there another way to understand the function of the borderand the status of the alien beyond the divisive and violent visionoffered in Independence Day? In the global community representedin the film, the inassimilable bad alien is absolutely otherto the good community, separated by an impenetrable boundarythat distinguishes us from them. But if we look a little moreclosely at the complex dynamics of labor and economy thatcharacterize the ongoing conflicts along the U.S. – Mexican border,it becomes difficult to view the border as a static andabsolute division. The border meant to distinguish and separate“us” from “them” is not an absolute boundary of separation.Rather, it is a complex and shifting scene of conflict and confrontationthat does not have a simple geographical or sociallocale. At the same time, the identities of those on either side ofthe border are not easily distinguished and cannot easily besorted into a coherent system of differences. People are notabsolutely divided by this border: families straddle the borderand individuals move across and back many times throughout alifetime. Nor is culture divided or distinguished by the border. Itis impossible to locate the end of Mexican culture or the beginningof U.S. culture in the complex border regions of the southwesternUnited States. Likewise, Mexican border cities such asTijuana are in many ways inseparable from the United States; inTijuana, one can spend U.S. dollars and speak English just as ifone were in San Diego on the other side of the border. Thus, theU.S. – Mexican border does not separate two distinct and distinguishableentities. Rather, the border serves as a mechanism ofcontrol that serves primarily to regulate the flow of cheap labor.A vision of the border that would take these complexities ofinterpenetration and interdependence into account would alsomake explicit the implicit divisions of labor and power thatunderpin scenes of global community, divisions that are maintainedby various kinds of border patrols.10V. Conflict and CommunityIn the seductive and glowing image of the happy global familyas imagined by the new corporate sponsors of the future, thedeepening global divisions of labor and profit are recast as aglobal homogenization of consumption, creating a positive andMacalester International Vol. 4194unifying world culture. And in turn, real conflicts over land,food, human rights, or self-determination are transformed into“ethnic conflicts” that are either recuperated as merely superficialdifferences of style or projected into the realm of the irrationaland the antimodern. But if conflict in the context ofglobalization is to be taken seriously as something more than ananachronistic and destructive resistance to the progressive forceof modernity, perhaps our first task must be to begin to recognizeand resist the easy ethnicization of conflict that allows us toattribute dissent and discord to anachronistic, evil, or irrationalethnicities.We need to pay more attention to the way in which the representationof conflicts as caused by “bad ethnicity” makes thoseconflicts appear both necessary and incomprehensible. The constructionof the “bad ethnic” allows us to forget to ask about theexperiences, perspectives, or needs of others. Instead, the badethnic is represented as irrational and out of control; the onlypossible response appears to be to try to subdue or manage theactions of the bad ethnic. We should also be alert to the way inwhich various groups are “ethnicized” — that is, groupedtogether as having a common nature, common lifestyle, commonvalues, and so on—even if from a social scientific perspectivethey might not be considered an ethnic group. “Badethnicity” appears in relation both to domestic conflicts andinternational issues. Consider the following examples of “badethnics”: terrorists, welfare mothers, homosexuals, drug users,communists, Arabs, Serbs, Bosnians. Each of these is seen in variousways as threatening “our” security, “our” values, “our”way of life, or “our” democratic institutions. The popularresponse to each of these imagined threats is police actions ofcontrol, exclusion, or elimination. If, for example, the plight ofso-called welfare mothers can be attributed to their “bad ethnicity,”that is, their alleged deviant habits and values (such as laziness,leeching off the state, promiscuity, and so on), then we feelnot only justified but perhaps righteous in demonizing and punishingthem. That is, the “good” community uses the explanationof “bad ethnicity” to justify excluding and guarding againstthe encroaching dangers of the “bad” alien other. But what ofother social and economic factors such as the unemploymentrate or the collapse of the urban industrial economy that mightSamira Kawash195contribute to the poverty of urban single mothers? These aremore complicated issues that are evaded when “bad ethnicity”is blamed for every social or political ill.Imagining conflict as an “alien invasion” and responding tothe perceived threat by securing the border works as a stopgapbetween the complexity and uncertainty with which we arefaced every day and the desire for an easy fix, one which willallow us to continue unchanged and unchallenged. Media spectaclesfrom Independence Day to the Olympics to the coverage ofthe presidential election work to constitute the “we” as a homogeneouscommunity of interest, and to exclude fundamentalconflict or dissent by displacing it to the dangerous outside to bemet with fear and suppressed by security measures. The globaltransformations and displacements we are witnessing cannotbut be conflictual. But identifying as evil aliens those who havebeen denied opportunities, or those who object to or seek tochange the relations of power or their place, shifts the realm ofconflict from politics to police. Policing the border and suppressingor eliminating anything that appears threatening doesnot make the community more secure. Rather, such policingserves only to foreclose any debate about who or what the communityought to be. So long as we believe in the “good ethnic”and the “bad alien,” we will be unable to imagine or bring intopractice a just or inclusive community, a community worthy ofthe name.11Notes1. For various perspectives on the invention of ethnicity, see Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism(London: Verso, 1983); Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1989); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);and Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: AmbiguousIdentities (New York: Verso, 1991).2. On the power of the U.S. media to shape international perceptions, see especiallyElla Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalismand the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994).3. Ammirati, Puris, and Lintas, New York, for United Parcel Service, 1996.4. The Arnell Group for Hanes Hosiery, 1996.5. Independence Day, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1996.Macalester International Vol. 41966. From the novelization of the film Independence Day, by Dean Devlin &Roland Emmerich and Stephen Molstad (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 238.7. Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S. – Mexico Border, 1978 – 1992:Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin: CMAS Books, Universtiy ofTexas at Austin, 1996); Wade Grahm, “Masters of the Game: How the U.S. Protectsthe Traffic in Cheap Mexican Labor” in Harper’s, July 1996, 35–50.8. California Proposition 187, passed on November 8, 1994, would deny publiclyfunded services, particularly health and education, to undocumentedimmigrants. The constitutionality of this measure continues to be contested incourt. For a summary of the law’s provisions and implications, see StanleyMailman, “California’s Proposition 187 and Its Lessons” in New York Law Journal,3 January 1995: 3.9. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.–Mexico Border, 83–94.10. For examples of such alternative border visions, see Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute,1987); Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Cultureand Legal Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and RosaLinda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Cheech Marin’s 1987 film, Born inEast L.A., dramatizes this alternative border vision in a parodic form.11. Many recent critics have proposed various notions of multicultural communitiesthat would recognize and be responsive to conflict. See especiallyDavid Theo Goldberg, ed., Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge,Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1994); Henry Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workersand the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992); Shohat and Stam,Unthinking Eurocentrism; and Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, eds., BetweenBorders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge,1994).Samira Kawash197

Parenting Across Borders

The DSKM Ethiopian Orthodox Church hopes to help children preserve their culture and excel in US schools. Courtesy of DSKM Education DepartmentIn Washington, D.C.,’s long-standing Ethiopian community, many families look to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to connect their children to the Ethiopian community. Reporter Dereje Desta visits the Re’ese Adbarat Debre Selam Kidest Mariam Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, which is trying to use language education and tutoring to help parents preserve culture, while improving children’s ability to access education. (audio)